The Challenge Of Learning Scrutiny Skills

Written by Sally Hamwee on Mon 29th Apr 2002

Local authorities are about to discover that exercising the scrutiny side of an executive / scrutiny split, especially when the executive arm is an elected mayor, is a whole new skill. And they are faced with the difficulty of explaining to a bemused public just what they can and can't do to hold the executive in check.

Of course they had a pretty shrewd idea when the proposal was first floated, and expressed their concerns vigorously. In London, where the role of the London Assembly is even more limited than that of the scrutiny arm of a council, we have been going for two years this week, and are revising how we do things in the light of that experience.

We have, in the words of the Greater London Authority Act, the job of "keeping under review the exercise by the Mayor of the statutory functions exercisable by him". However, that doesn't mean only his actions and decisions; we also have the power of investigating matters that we "consider to be of importance to Greater London".

The Assembly has used this investigative power in the last two years, but undoubtedly we could have used it more, and more effectively. We have published reports on issues ranging from smoking in public places and the transport of nuclear waste to graffiti and public transport in outer London, not in response to Mayoral proposals but because we thought they were important.

When Ford published their plans to stop vehicle assembly at Dagenham, we invited the management to come and answer questions about employment in the area. During a period of strikes on South West Trains by the RMT we invited the union and the train operator, though only the union came. But the procedures which have allowed this are cumbersome – it was obvious that we needed to be able to get work started with the minimum of fuss and the maximum speed if we were to play a real part in topical issues.

So we have decided to move from having a small number of standing committees, setting up specific investigations on an ad hoc basis, which required the agreement of the full Assembly, which you might describe as the traditional local government model, to something closer to the Parliamentary select committee model. More committees, not for the sake of having meetings (this group of politicians is not wedded to meetings!) but so that we can react faster to events. Each committee will cover a subject area and in total have remits for all the areas in which the GLA has any sort of power: Transport, Economic and Social Development, Environment, Health, Culture, Sport and Tourism, Planning, Public Services and Budget. They will look in detail at draft mayoral strategies and choose issues, sometimes for a swift critique, sometimes for more lengthy analysis.

Changing the internal structure will not of itself improve the end product. The Assembly will continue to question the Mayor, both in the formal Mayor's Question Times (ten a year, lasting two and a half hours), and in full session or through committees will question the chairs of the police and fire authorities and the development agency, as well as the Commissioners of Transport and the Metropolitan Police, and Mayoral advisors. We will continue to ask people who can contribute to our work to come to "evidence sessions" – at present, for instance, we are looking at flooding and have held formal sessions with the Environment Agency, the boroughs, an academic, Thames Water and so on.

Forensic skills do not always come naturally to politicians. There is always the temptation to make your own speech, and tack on a question, or to ask such a complicated or long question that your witness quite genuinely cannot remember what he has been asked. Short sharp questions are undoubtedly more effective, but this needs the support of other members who are champing at the bit to get in their own two penn'orth.

Equally difficult is joining up the bits. It takes discipline, not just a good memory, to store an answer to throw back in a year's time. Connecting the evidence from one investigation with another takes imagination and effort, both from members and officers. And co-operating across party in the common goal of holding the Mayor to account when members do not all share the same policy base, and sometimes may see attacking another party as the prime objective – these are part of the context, the background noise, with which local and regional politicians will have to become more familiar and each work out for ourselves how to handle.

The frustration of having no executive powers will remain, but learning scrutiny skills is a challenge. And when someone said to me: Put that answer in your handbag, I thought: But retrieving it from a handbag full of all sorts of detritus may be the biggest challenge of all.